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My Blog and I

My name is Diana. I am the blogger behind Offbeat Vagabond. I just
wanted something to help me rant on about things I love or don't quite
love. I am big on books, especially Urban
Fantasy, it is my favorite genre. Any Romance has to be Paranormal,
because love isn't natural without a gun and a beast involved. Although my tastes are very much expanding, I have discovered a love for Contemporary even BDSM (shocking!) I love
movies. Sci-fi/Fantasy/Horror/Action, pretty much anything as long as no
Romantic Comedies are involved (Katherine Heigl, you have been warned).
Music, TV, Wrestling are all my things as well (although I haven't been watching Wrestling as much as I used to). I am doing this for fun. I want to
write on a professional front, so blogging is a good stepping stone for
me. I just hope that stone doesn't have moss and I slip and break
something. So join me in my little piece of the Internet and remember,
it is normal to be abnormal

Lance’s
spare time is dedicated to the cult of his body and writing a
how-not-to book entitled Sexual Secrets of a Sexual Surrogate. His
personal life consists of Sunday tea with his grandmother and a monthly
night out with his best friend, George. Oh, and no sex, none whatsoever.

When
a wealthy, ruthless mother offers him an enormous sum to seduce and
impregnate her thirty-six-year-old daughter, Millicent Deafly, a
debt-ridden Lance hesitantly agrees.However, Millicent is not into
sex, and definitely not into Lance. She’s chosen the other end of the
sensuality spectrum and is heavily into food. She is bright, bouncy and
joyous, uninhibitedly plump, natural, and completely dedicated to her
palate. The only way Lance will get her attention is if he dabs soy
sauce on his pulse points.

Determined to get close to her, Lance
creates an alter ego—sweetly shy Wilfred Pecklise—and takes a job at
Millicent’s dinner club, Guilty Pleasures.

Guilty Pleasures
caters to the flamboyant and the eccentric: supermodels pigging out,
trash-metal rock stars with penis-piercings and their loving grannies,
the widows of billionaires, and many more oddities.

Lance finds
himself immersed in a sensuous world of scents, tastes, and color, and
befriended by Serge Moreno—a homosexual black dwarf who has had a
colorful life as a prostitute in Istanbul, a fluffer in skin flicks in
Vegas, and is now a celebrity chef in London.

Ironically, Lance isn’t just failing to seduce Millie, but falling madly in love with her.Balancing
the two lives of Lance and Wilfred becomes next to impossible when his
geeky best friend, George, suddenly marries and decides to hold the
reception at Guilty Pleasures. Will the truth be uncovered?

“Can you believe this, Will? Here we
place fake dew on berries, for people who sell fake dreams and pay
real money so they can eat real food without anyone knowing. Amazing.
They go out and eat macro/micro/molecular or whatever is in fashion
for the week, when their bodies crave something fat and rich . . . we
are like a dirty secret. They come and eat with their han...ds and
they lick their fingers. Here is the world.”

Lance laughed and shook his head.

Serge waved the spray mister
about. “People are ashamed to eat good food in decent portions in
public, but you get a two-bit whore teaching bored housewives how to
give great head on morning TV.” He sighed and shook his head. “And
let me tell you, she didn’t know what she was talking about. Best
practitioner of fellatio in the world was the Empress of China.”

Lance’s jaw dropped. “Empress of .
. . are you serious?”

“What an artist . . . the man could
make a stone come. He was a eunuch, a real pure from birth, reared in
the Forbidden City. He trained us—the new arrivals—decided on our
speciality, and our look. He was an old, old man when I knew him, but
he still had all his own teeth, and was limber and graceful as a
gazelle. A very wise man. He told me I had to decide, as a freak, if
I’d rather be a clown or a demon. He said we oddities—and he
spoke from experience—attracted the cowardly and the cruel. Easy
targets for the unimaginative, you see.”

Lance nodded soberly. “A wise man,
your friend.”

Serge smiled grimly. “Yes, he was. So
I was the demon, and Yusuf was the angel. What a spectacle we were,
Will. Food for the gods’ lust, or the devils’. Yusuf was a
hermaphrodite, see. Beautiful, Will. Never have I seen a more
beautiful face. He had breasts and a body to make Aphrodite weep with
envy, and a man’s prick he had, but the Empress always presented
him fully clothed in a long white virginal shift, his hair loose like
an angel’s, and then he’d wet the shift down. It would cling,
see, the breasts of Venus, the prick of Mars. Some bastards would pay
to see us freaks together.”

“My God, Serge, how did you stay
sane?”

“Willie, things are simple. You do
what you do to survive. We all pander to the powerful’s desires,
don’t we? Only today, it’s even worse. Since survival is
practically guaranteed, these people obsess over the basic things
that signify survival—food and fucking. My father said that when
the few value our art the most, is when the many are the most hungry.
He was right.”

*********************************************

About Manuela Cardiga

Manuela
Cardiga was born in Mozambique and raised in South Africa where she
studied fashion design. She moved to Europe where she worked as a
fashion designer, then moved to the crazy world of advertising as a
graphic designer and copywriter. Manuela is a designer by profession, a
cook by vocation, and a writer by compulsion. She currently resides in
Lisbon, Portugal where she writes contemporary and historical fiction,
designs book covers, illustrates children’s books, and mothers a
gorgeous daughter while juggling a day job. She also dabbles
enthusiastically in exotic, experimental cuisine, much to the discomfort
of family and friends.

Due to the daily spam comments I have been getting lately and to avoid the annoying word verification, Anonymous comments are no more. I do not want bargains on bags, watches, jerseys, boots and other crap. Geez, they could at least spam me with book and movie stuff, I would be somewhat interested LOL! Thank you :D